


we stumble on. it is enough.

by thermodynamicActivity (chlorinetrifluoride)



Series: The Collegestuck 'Verse [27]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Humanstuck, Trans Karkat Vantas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-18
Updated: 2017-11-18
Packaged: 2019-02-04 01:23:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12760251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chlorinetrifluoride/pseuds/thermodynamicActivity
Summary: Your name is Karkat Vantas, you are a sophomore in high school, and you are tired of pretending to be someone you're not. Although you know that all your friends know what your deal is gender-wise, that you're not a young lady by any estimation of the word, your parents don't, and your brother talks too fucking much for you to even start to explain your situation to him, despite all his facile social justice posturing. So you go to someone you trust to hear you out, because you need to tell an actual adult before you lose your mind, and you need to tell someone who won't judge you. Might as well be your guidance counselor.





	we stumble on. it is enough.

**Author's Note:**

> just for anyone who's kind of new to my human names for the ancestors  
> dolores martineau = the dolorosa  
> alessio amalberti = dualscar

**February 2009 - Karkat Vantas**

At first glance, you’re not the kind of person who should be capable of having any secrets. You have two volumes: loud enough to deafen people, and speechless. The second one generally only sees the light of day when you’re taking an exam and you are not allowed to shout about how you never fucking learned about imaginary numbers, and what the fuck is your trig teacher playing at testing you on this shit?

However, one of the few adults who can strip away your pretenses is your guidance counselor. She doesn’t have to interrogate you to do this, which is nice, because interrogation would merely put you on the defense and cause you to say nothing until you got sent back to class.

Mostly, all she does is listen, replying when you feel like talking, but otherwise just waiting for you to set the topic of the conversation. You don’t know enough people who listen like that. Your friends, yeah. Actual adults, not so much.

Your parents certainly mean well but they talk and talk and talk, without even trying to comprehend your side of things. And Kankri? He’s even worse with the unceasing lectures, and even if he weren’t, you’d hardly count him as an adult. Your mom still needs to wake him up for school, even if he’s going to be twenty in a few months.

Even so, you feel like you have no right to complain about your family. Sollux lives in a small house with like ten of his relatives, most of whom work, all so they have enough money to both pay the mortgage, and send one of his cousins to college.

Kanaya’s parents subscribe to the whole “spare the rod, spoil the child” school of discipline, and while she seldom puts a toe out of line - at least when she’s at home - when she slips up, the results are explosive. Not as explosive as they were with her older sister, but still pretty awful.

Your parents don’t hit you or shout at you, and you live in a nice cozy brownstone in Park Slope. You’re bougie. You’re fairly affluent. You have no right to be upset. 

You’re lucky.

Still, you just wish your parents would listen more.

Because you need someone to listen to you, someone older and wiser, who might be able to help you out, or at least let you talk without interjecting with their own two cents every thirty seconds.

You’ve considered contacting your brother’s friends - at least the two sensible ones - but they’re in college, which presumably means they have more important things to do than listen to your ramblings.

That said, there are things you need to get off your chest before they eat you alive.

Instead of going to AP World History, you make your way down to Ms. Martineau’s office, and pray that she’s not occupied with another student. It’s not college apps season anymore, so there shouldn’t be a line of seniors, in varying degrees of nervous breakdown mode, waiting for their turn to see their guidance counselor.

You walk, with leaden feet, until you see a placard reading “Dolores Martineau” nailed to the door of an office in this department. Ms. Martineau’s door is half open. 

Nevertheless, you knock before you enter.

She gets up from her chair, and as soon as she catches sight of you, she smiles and invites you in, closing the door behind you to maintain your privacy.

“Good afternoon, Miss Vantas. What’s on your mind?” she asks.

Your face falls, but you will yourself to chill out, because she doesn’t know the full story yet, and she wouldn’t know that she’s just knocked your confidence down two pegs in a few words.

“I really, really need to talk to you.”

You can tell that she’s worried, a little furrow forming between her eyebrows, but nevertheless, she calmly asks you to sit down.

Despite your anxiety, you’re set on explaining what’s going on with you, because you have to tell somebody before you completely lose your mind. Or before your marks drop any further.

Your grades have been dropping throughout sophomore year, your number of absences also mounting, and although you keep paying Sollux to forge your mother’s signature on the absence notes, this arrangement cannot last. You think you’re allowed ten absences before they actually call your house to ask what’s going on with you, and while you know how to screen phone calls, one slip could fuck everything up.

Moreover, Ms. Martineau called you down to her office maybe twelve days ago to ask what was going on with you this year.

You’ve slipped from having a 94 average for both terms of your freshman year, to an 81 for the first semester of your sophomore year, which makes your overall an 89.67. Not bad, but going from 94 to 81 is quite a drop. It wasn’t so egregious that she was required to call home, but it was concerning enough that she wanted to meet with you.

When she asked you if you were having problems at home, or with your friends, you answered in the negative. When she asked if you were having any trouble understanding the subject material at hand, and maybe needed extra tutoring, which she could arrange with your teachers, you shook your head. You understood everything just fine, you’ve just been having some problems paying attention. You blamed it on debate team. She seemed to believe this, when you gave the excuse, at least you hope she did.

You don’t know. You don’t know anymore.

You had a game plan for telling her the secret that you’ve been carrying around since you were in the single digits age-wise, but as soon as you sit down and open your mouth, you burst into tears. Not just any tears. Full-on hysterics that leave you gasping for air, spots forming in your field of vision.

Karkat, you are absolutely useless.

“Karkat,” Ms. Martineau says gently. “Karkat, focus on the sound of my voice.”

Her voice sounds like it’s coming from underwater, but you try to keep your gaze focused on her jade green eyes, her heart shaped face, the lines at the corners of her mouth, and the thin chain with the gold crucifix around her neck.

You remember wearing a similar crucifix during your graduation from 8th grade, where you had on a scarlet dress underneath your robe, your nails painted the same shade of red, and your mother declared you the most beautiful young lady she’d ever seen. But it was wrong, wrong, wrong, so wrong that after the ceremony, you begged Kanaya to let you borrow her nail polish remover so you could scour every single bit of red from your fingernails.

You may not have minded the nail polish had it been your choice, and not part of manicure your parents browbeat you into getting.

That said, you didn’t take the dress off until you got home, because your mother, your understanding mother, well, it was no secret that she’d always wanted a daughter. You didn’t want to burst her bubble. You still don’t.

Here, in 2009, Ms. Martineau says your name with a bit more force.

“Karkat?”

You finally look up, more present than you were before. Once she has as much attention as you can give, she starts to speak.

“Karkat. Breathe with me. Slowly, okay?”

You want to curse the person who invented these insipid breathing exercises, because half the time they don’t work, and the other half of the time they make you feel like you’re either an idiot or a little kid. Karkat Vantas, can’t even calm down without external intervention.

For what it’s worth, your anxiety drops a degree or two. You remember why you’re here. You remember what you must do.

“I have to tell you something.”

Ms. Martineau gives you a reassuring look. “Okay, Karkat.”

“It’s… It’s…” You need a moment to find the right words. “It’s important. And I’m scared.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being afraid. It’s okay,” she says.

She gives you a few minutes to collect yourself. You mentally try to calculate how many minutes are left in 7th period. And when that tightness in your chest has loosened enough that you no longer feel like you’re running out of air, you continue.

“Do you promise not to tell anyone what I’m about to tell you?” you ask.

You don’t even need to glance up to ascertain that the answer is no. After neither of you speak for a while, Ms. Martineau sighs.

While you were considering your words a few minutes ago, somehow, a cherry flavored Jolly Rancher found its way from the basket of candy next to her computer over to your side of the desk. You open it and pop it into your mouth, smoothing out the cellophane square until it lies flat. You don’t know why the exercise relaxes you, but it does.

“It depends,” she says. “If what you tell me suggests that you or another person is in danger of being seriously hurt, I will have no choice but to notify someone. Those are the rules, I do not make them, and I cannot break them, nor would I wish to.”

Right. Okay. That makes sense.

“It’s not like that,” you promise her.

Another long, uncomfortable silence, until you decide to break it.

“You ever feel like people see you, but don’t see who you actually are?”

She nods.

“Honestly?” she asks. “I felt that way a lot when I was your age. Sometimes, a great deal of that feeling has to do with being a teenager.”

“I guess,” you say, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

“However, I feel as if that is not why you came to speak to me, Karkat,” she goes on.

“It’s not. Not all of it.”

Now might be a good time to tell her that you’re cutting AP World, so she can write you a pass, otherwise you’ll get detention for skipping class.

But… first you gotta tell her what’s going on.

Now or never Karkat, because you know that if you don’t say it now, it’s gonna take you another year and change of high school to work up the courage to try again. And by then, you’ll be a senior. You don’t want to go to college and still have this issue remain unresolved.

You tried to explain your feelings to Kankri awhile back, which was a mistake. Instead of his understanding, he gave you a lecture about gendered expectations, a long, meandering speech that left no room for you to get a word in edgewise. When you tried to clarify what you meant, he suggested that perhaps you had a bad case of internalized misogyny, along with dissatisfaction with your proscribed gender role.

You refrained from calling him the most colossal douche on the face of the earth, because even if he is patently tone-deaf, his boyfriend, Cronus, is way douchier than he is.

Then, you turned to Google, searching for all the information you could find. You should have probably turned to Google first. You studied up on what you thought might be the problem, studied hard like you might be tested on it, spent several months considering the idea, and then decided to go to the one adult who would simultaneously be knowledgeable enough to help you out, and probably wouldn’t judge you for your revelation. So here you are.

Ms. Martineau hasn’t pressured you to speak yet, but you should probably say something before 8th period starts.

“I well, I…” You moisten your lips with your tongue. “I’m weird.”

“Weird?” she asks.

“Okay, so…” You consider your words. “I think I might be a boy. Not really think, really. Like, I’ve been doing a shitlo–… a buttload of reading, and thinking, and I’m pretty sure about it. I get confused about a lot of shit, like the law of cosines, or uh, symbolism in the Odyssey…” Dear fuck, you’re rambling. You force yourself back on task. “But this isn’t that. I am not a girl. I don’t think I ever was.”

She says nothing, and for one terrifying second you worry that you may have erred in terms of how you assumed she’d react. Maybe she is judging you. The thought of that makes you start wordlessly crying.

Ms. Martineau hands you several tissues.

“Like I said,” you continue, mopping your eyes with a wadded up tissue. “I’m weird.”

She shakes her head, and puts a light hand on yours.

“There is nothing weird about what you have told me, Karkat,” she says. “Furthermore, admitting something like this to anyone takes a lot of courage. Let me repeat this. You are not weird. You are not strange. There is nothing wrong with you.”

You find that you can look her in the eye now, in short bursts, even though part of you is screaming for you to bolt out the door, guidance office pass or not, that maybe you can pass it off as a goof if you leave now. You’ll take your detentions from Mr. Amalberti, and probably sit in detention next to Gamzee and Roxy, playing hangman.

“Um. Thanks,” you tell her.

You don’t move your hand, because you find Ms. Martineau’s gesture oddly comforting. And you want to say more than that, but you’ve been struck silent.

Fuck, you made the confession to end all confessions, so why do you still feel somewhat dizzy, your extremities tingling and trembling? If you tried to get up now, you might fall over. It's like your brain didn't get the calm the fuck down signal. To be fair, it rarely does.

Ms. Martineau seems to sense this, because she politely suggests that you to stay in your chair until you feel steady on your feet, and offers you another candy. She cracks the door to her office to let some air in.

You exhale. You inhale. You do this a few times.

“You’re uh… you’re not going to tell my parents, are you?” you ask.

She shakes her head.

“Not unless that is something you want me to do.”

You start babbling again before you can stop yourself.

“Like, my parents are all educated and shit, so I’m pretty sure they at least _know of_ this stuff, but it’s all like, well, I’m already about to fail math, so it’d be kinda weird for me to be all like, hey, I got a fucking forty on my trig test, I didn’t do my laundry, and by the way, I’m probably trans or some shit, surprise, surprise.”

Ms. Martineau gives a small snort.

“That may not be the best way to go about things, no,” she says. “But Karkat, this is your life, and your life alone. You do not necessarily owe your parents an explanation until you see fit to give one.”

That makes you feel a little better. Less inclined to try to hide in your oversized black turtleneck. You tell Ms. Martineau that you cut AP World in order to see her, and she promises to write you a pass for both this period and the next one if need be.

Honestly, all you want to do is put your head down on her desk and close your eyes for a while out of sheer relief, but that would probably be bad form. You’ve been so keyed up at the thought of telling a real adult, that now that you have, you feel exhausted.

You think you’ll be able to make it to your next class, though.

You just need a moment to think. You just need to wait for the world to normalize again.

Days and weeks and months later, you'll come back to her office and ask her for advice on what you should do next - and a lot of times, not even she will have an answer - but for now... for now, you've done what you needed to do. When you get home, you think you'll take a nap or something. You think you've earned that much. Yeah, there's still an astonishing amount of bullshit to contemplate, a bunch of hoops you'll have to jump through later, but at least you've taken a step you weren't sure you could take.

You don't exactly walk into your 8th period class triumphantly, like you've figured out the secret of life, but you do show up, for what that's worth. You give Kanaya and Sollux nods of recognition, and a half smile as you pass their desk. You give your guidance pass to your English teacher, and once the discussion properly begins, you put your head down on your arms in earnest and begin to doze off.


End file.
